Kepler's solution to the misery and confusion around him was to 'sink the anchor of his peaceful studies into the ground of eternity'. Should scientists and engineers be given the luxury of this kind of withdrawal from the world? Invention and discovery have transformed nature. To what extent do the agents who made these changes have to take responsibility for their creations? This question is cogently raised by novels like Frankenstein and Jurassic Park. In both cases, we have creators who are obsessed with inventing a way of bringing what was dead back to life. Dr. Frankenstein was initially obsessed with finding the secret to life; once he found it, instead of publishing it in a refereed journal, he decided to demonstrate his power by creating life. To Hammond, the entrepreneur in Jurassic Park, discoveries were incidental to the goal of cloning dinosaurs. Both were motivated by what Arnold Pacey has called 'technological sweetness' borrowing a phrase from Robert Oppenheimer, who "is famous for his statement that one invention used in the hydrogen bomb was 'technically so sweet that you could not argue' against its adoption" (Pacey, 1989, p. 81). Creating life, cloning dinosaurs--these are stupendous technological feats.
But neither Frankenstein nor Hammond considered the possible impacts of their discoveries and inventions. Frankenstein imagined that "A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me" (Shelley, 1818, p. 101). But when his eight-foot man stirred, Frankenstein ran from him in revulsion, refusing to accept the consequences for his actions. The creation turned into a monster and Frankenstein ended his life pursing its destruction. In contrast, Hammond dreamed about building new dinosaur parks as he was devoured by the clones he had brought back to life.
The moral of Frankenstein and Jurassic Park is that the inventor of a new technology like the telephone or the microchip should imagine the potential impact of her invention and embrace the consequences. Latour studied the Aramis, an automatic system of guided transportation that merged mental models based on automobiles and metros. Aramis was a project pursued in France for almost twenty years, from 1969 to 1987--it flickered in and out of existence several times before being abandoned Aramis was to be composed of small cars running on tracks. A passenger entered a destination at the station, then was assigned to a car that would couple with other cars to form a train until it got close to the destination, then it would uncouple to ride as close as possible to where the passenger wanted to go. The final design looked much like the first one, despite multiple proposals for changes from a variety of interest groups. Latour concluded that Aramis, like Frankenstein's creation, was killed because it was not loved by its creators: they saw Aramis as a research project, not as a real, working system (Latour, 1996). There was no Chester Carlson (the inventor of photocopying--see 3.14.1) for Aramis, no obsessed champion who would stop at nothing until the system was running.
A contrasting view is exemplified by the 'guns don't kill people, people kill people' slogan of those who oppose gun control. To put it in more general terms, this is the 'technology is neutral' view: a telephone can be used for life-saving communications and for telemarketing. It is up to society, not the inventor, to determine how it is used.
To shed further light on this question, let us consider the technology alluded to in the Oppenheimer quote about technological sweetness.
Einstein's discovery that E=MC2 was a significant intellectual achievement, one of the important consequences of his revolutionary theory of special relativity. He derived this equation from the fact that no object could travel faster than light; therefore, as objects approached the speed of light, they had to acquire increasing inertial mass.
This discovery suggested that all matter contained an enormous amount of energy. The cold fusion controversy, discussed in the last chapter, illustrates our continuing efforts to tap this potential energy.
In 1939, Lise Meitner was puzzling over a new experimental result obtained by her former collaborator, Otto Hahn. Meitner was in Sweden, where she had fled from the Nazis; Hahn was still in Germany, and could not publicly acknowledge working with her. But the two continued their collaboration through correspondence. Their most recent series of experiments had been an effort to figure out what happened when a neutron hit a Uranium nucleus. Their initial hypothesis was that several transuranic elements had been created. But now Hahn, a chemist, had found evidence that Barium was produced when Uranium absorbed a neutron. This made no sense--Barium was well down the periodic table from Uranium.
Hahn, Meitner and others were in a situation similar to Kepler, when he dropped the assumption of perfect circles. No one at this time had any idea that a nucleus could be split. But Meitner, isolated from her beloved laboratory and most of the scientific community, was able to spend some time on vacation with her nephew, Otto Robert Frisch, a physicist working with the great Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. It was during this vacation that Meinter got a letter from Hahn outlining the incredible Barium result. She quickly dismissed the possibility of error--Hahn was too good a chemist--and worked with Otto Robert to figure out how this could have happened. They used a liquid drop metaphor for the atomic nucleus, favored by Bohr who had refined it. Frisch remembered that,
At this point we both sat down on a tree trunk, and started to calculate on scraps of paper. The charge of a uranium nucleus, we found, was indeed large enough to destroy the effect of surface tension almost completely, so the uranium nucleus might indeed be a very wobbly, unstable drop, ready to divide itself at the slightest provocation (such as the impact of a neutron).
But there was another problem. When the two drops separated they would be driven apart by their mutual electric repulsion and would acquire a very large energy, about 200 MeV in all; where could that energy come from? Fortunately Lise Meitner remembered how to compute the masses of nuclei from the so-called packing fraction formula, and in that way she worked out that the two nuclei formed by the division of a uranium nucleus would be lighter than the original uranium nucleus by about one-fifth the mass of a proton. Now whenever mass disappears energy is created, according to Einstein's formula E=mc2, and one-fifth of a proton mass was just equivalent to 200MeV. So here was the source for the energy; it all fitted! (Quoted in Sime, 1996, p. 237)
This kind of retrospective recollection, written years after the fact, deserves to be treated with a grain of salt. The account is reminiscent of the Buddha, sitting under a Bo tree and achieving enlightenment. Nonetheless, there is a plausibility to the 'back-of-the-envelope' calculations involved; Meitner and Frisch were certainly capable of doing them, once they had the liquid drop mental model.
Frisch termed this process nuclear fission, borrowing the term from a biologist. He conducted a follow-up experiment which confirmed their discovery, and he and Meitner published the results. But by then, word was already spreading, as it does in research communities.
This discovery spurred efforts to harness the energy released by fission. Leo Szilard, an emigre Hungarian physicist, was one of the first to recognize the long-term possibilities. In 1932, he had offered to work with Lise Meitner in nuclear physics because he thought such work might help save mankind. He watched the growing Nazi menace and left Germany a day before the Nazis began searching trains and preventing wholesale emigration. Szilard spent much of the succeeding years trying to find places in America and Britain for scientists driven out by the Nazis. Many of Europe's best physicists, including Szilard, Einstein, Neils Bohr and Enrico Fermi, fled to America to escape from fascism, and many lesser-known ones as well.
When Szilard learned about fission, he realized immediately that the energy released was extremely high, and might be used as a source of power or as a new kind of bomb. He was particularly concerned that the United States possess such a weapon before Nazi Germany. Szilard helped Einstein, an avowed pacifist, draft a letter to President Roosevelt in which he mentioned the possibility of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type" and warned that nuclear experiments were being carried out in Germany. He urged the President to secure uranium supplies.
Were Einstein and Szilard in this case acting like Frankenstein, launching a technological adventure that would spin beyond their control? Szilard saw the bomb as a necessity only as long as the Nazis might build one. As soon as American troops captured German scientists like Heisenberg that were capable of designing such a weapon, Szilard lobbied for a termination of the program to build an atomic weapon (Wyden, 1984). It was, in his view, no longer necessary. But few other scientists listened to him. It seemed ridiculous to stop when they were so close to success, and after the government had invested so much.
Szilard next circulated a petition urging that no atomic bomb be used on Japan until the Japanese were given the chance to publicly refuse detailed surrender terms. When a majority of the scientists he was working with at Chicago objected on the grounds that more lives would be saved by using the bomb, Szilard responded that this was "a utilitarian argument with which I was very familiar through my previous experiences in Germany" (Wyden, 1984, p. 176).
One alternative proposed by at least some scientists was a demonstration, dropping the bomb on an unpopulated area of Japan, or so high that it would kill few people. Oppenheimer was among those who argued that a demonstration would not be convincing enough. To be effective at ending the war, it had to be dropped on a city. 'Little Boy', a bomb based on U235, was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 with an estimated 100,000 casualties--no worse than the devastation wrought by Curtis LeMay's fire-bombing of Tokyo, except that this new weapon included long-term radiation effects which kept pushing the death toll higher--up to 140,000 by the end of 1945 and perhaps as many as 200,000 at the five-year mark. A physician described the horror:
Between the [heavily damaged] Red Cross Hospital and the center of the city I saw nothing that wasn't burned to a crisp. Streetcars were standing at Kawaya-cho and Kamiya-cho and inside were dozens of bodies, blackened beyond recognition. I saw fire reservoirs filled to the brim with dead people who looked as though they had been boiled alive. In one reservoir I saw a man, horribly burned, crouching beside another man who was dead. He was drinking blood-stained water out of the reservoir....In one reservoir there were so many dead people there wasn't enough room for them to fall over. They must have died sitting in the water (Rhodes, 1986, p. 724).
The follow-up bombing of Nagasaki, with the first device made from plutonium, occurred only three days later--the Japanese government was still assimilating the news from the first bombing. The Emperor forced his military leaders to agree to a surrender offer which reached Washington on August 11th, and further use of atomic bombs was suspended.
Unlike Szilard, Einstein was not involved in developing the bomb. Not long before his death, he told Linus Pauling, "I made one great mistake in my life--when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that an atomic bomb be made" (Wyden, 1984, p. 342).
Other protagonists felt morally ambiguous about their role in this invention. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos facility, described his reaction to the first successful test:
We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him; he takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" (Rhodes, 1986, p. 676).
Shortly after the war, Oppenheimer reflected on this moment in mythological terms:
When it went off, in the New Mexico dawn, that first atomic bomb, we thought of Alfred Nobel, and his hope, his vain hope, that dynamite would put an end to wars. We thought of the legend of Prometheus, of that deep sense of guilt in man's new powers, that reflects his recognition of evil, and his long knowledge of it. We knew that it was a new world, but even more we knew that novelty itself was a very old thing in human life, that all our ways are rooted in it (Rhodes, 1986, p.676).
Right after the war, Oppenheimer gave a speech to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists in which he clarified his vision of the scientist's role in creating this kind of novelty:
When you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and values...It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the consequences (Rhodes, 1986, p.761).
For Oppenheimer, the scientist is a Promethean hero who must bring fire and other great marvels to humanity, regardless of the consequences. Prometheus paid a heavy price for his gift, and so did Oppenheimer: he was eventually stripped of his security clearance and banned from the kind of high-level activities he had become used to during the war and afterwards. This investigation is exactly the sort of thing Americans became used to during the McCarthy years, even though McCarthy himself was not involved. Oppeneheimer never got to see the full evidence against him until he was examined by the prosecution, and his lawyer could not be present during this key portion of the trial. The prosecutor tied Oppy in knots over his relationships with Communist sympathizers early in World War II. But the real motive for the trial was Oppenheimer's ambivalence about pursuing a hydrogen bomb. He wanted to rein his Frankenstein in a bit, if possible--not set out immediately to make a much more powerful monster. Edward Teller, one of the fathers of the Hydrogen bomb, testified that Oppenheimer did not deserve clearance, helping to seal his fate (Goodchild, 1981).
The distinguished physicist I.I. Rabi, in a conversation with Bill Moyers' wrote Oppy's epitaph:
Here was a man who had done so greatly for his country. A wonderful representative. He was forgiven the atomic bomb. Crowds followed him. He was a man of peace. And they destroyed this man. There were scientists among them. One reason doing it might be envy. Another might be personal dislike. A third, a genuine fear of communism. I don't think he was a security risk. I do think he walked along the edge of a precipice. He didn't pay enough attention to the outward symbols.
One might also add that he never took the full hero's journey inward--never came to grips with the fact that he was a discoverer, and inventor, a man of peace and a maker of weapons, a man who believed it was right to take the path of technological sweetness and at the same time experienced grave moral doubts. Later in life, in the summer of 1964, at a conference he had helped organize to think about how to achieve a more peaceful civilization, Oppenheimer remarked "We most of all should try to be experts on the worst among ourselves" (Goodchild, 1981, p.278). This comment suggests he was taking that final step in his inward journey, and urging others to do the same.
Stanislaw Ulam, who shares with Edward Teller credit for inventing the hydrogen bomb, recalled that his Aunt Caro was related to the legendary Rabbi who created the Golem, a creature from Jewish mythology made out of clay and water that grows stronger every day and will follow your orders, protecting you from enemies. Norbert Wiener, upon hearing this story, said to Ulam, "It is still in the family!" (Rhodes, 1995, p.575).
Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, two sociologists of science, use the Golem metaphor to describe science. They warn that the Golem "is clumsy and dangerous. Without control, a golem may destroy its masters with its flailing vigour" (Collins & Pinch, 1993, p.1).
Teller's response to those who doubted that a hydrogen bomb should be built suggest he saw science as a kind of Golem: "If the development [of such a weapon] is possible, it is out of our powers to prevent it" (Rhodes, 1986, p.757). Oppenheimer's scientist is morally obligated to push for new discoveries, regardless of the consequences; Teller's scientist is carried along by an inevitable tsunami of technological momentum.
In contrast, Andrei Sakharov, one of the creators of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, spent much of the rest of his life trying to end the totalitarian government that benefited from his discovery. The day after the successful test of a Soviet super, Sakharov was asked to offer a toast, and drank to the hope that they would never have to use such a weapon. The Soviet general in charge of the operation made a lewd joke whose substance was, you made it, but we will decide how to use it. Like many of the American scientists, Sakharov had created a tool over which he would no longer have control. But in America, at least scientists like Oppenheimer and Teller remained respected voices regarding atomic policy--until Oppenheimer's fall from grace. Sakharov tried. He wrote letters protesting Soviet atomic tests in the 1950s and 1960s, on the grounds that radioactive contamination was immoral precisely because no one could be held accountable for it, its effects were uncertain and future generations were defenseless against it. In other words, instead of saying that one should wait until the fallout from atomic tests was proven to cause harm, one should exercise a little moral imagination, anticipate the probable effects, and ban tests altogether. He also argued that the tests made thermonuclear war more likely. Sakharov went beyond letters. Because he was a Hero of the Soviet Union, he was able to get access to policy-makers like Kruschev and make his protests personally. The leaders assured him they were taking his protests seriously, but the tests went on.
Sakharov remembered how the frustration led him to a kind of moral epiphany:
I had an awful sense of powerlessness. I could not stop something I knew was wrong and unnecessary. After that, I felt myself another man. I broke with my surroundings. It was a basic break. After that, I understood there was no point in arguing (Bailey, 1990, p. 238).
Sakharov made the transition from an insider who protested within the system to a dissident. In August, 1968, he published an essay on "Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom" in the New York Times. In it, he argued that,
intellectual freedom is essential to human society--freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship. Freedom of thought is the only guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific democratic approach to politics, economics and culture (Bailey, 1990, p. 247).
Sakharov had money, power and privilege within the Soviet system, but also a 'very tragic feeling'. He willingly gave up many of his privileges, including his special apartment, in protest against a corrupt system which denied individual freedom. He was eventually exiled to Gorky for seven8 years, then rehabilitated by Gorbachev. Characteristically, when Gorbachev called to announce Sakharov's freedom, the latter pointedly questioned the former about other dissidents, demanding their release. Sakharov was elected to the new Soviet Congress, drafted a new constitution for the Soviet Union, and died while writing one of his many speeches--worn out by hunger strikes, exile and the hard work of promoting freedom.
Like Frankenstein, Sakharov literally gave his life in an effort to chain the monster he had created. But unlike Frankenstein, he did not regret what he had done. He recalled initially resisting invitations to join in the development of nuclear weapons, but was concerned that if only one side possessed nuclear weapons, it might be tempted to use them, while the weaker side might be moved to desperate acts to keep from falling behind. In Sakharov's view, both he and Oppenheimer were justified in creating weapons, in order to maintain the terrible balance that Niels Bohr foresaw.
Sakahrov and his fellow scientists were further spurred by the knowledge that they were surrounded by prison laborers who constructed the buildings and mined the uranium. Paradoxically, Sakharov felt their work had to justify this terrible sacrifice. There was another motive as well--Oppenheimer's technological sweetness:
I found it very interesting. This was not because of what Fermi calls 'interesting physics'; here the interest was evoked by the grandiosity of the problem, the possibility to show what you could do. That's the way scientists are (Bailey, 1990, p. 423).
Like Prometheus, Sakharov brought the fire--and like the true Campbellian hero, when confronted with the consequences of his action, he heeded the call for an inward journey, one that transformed him from a Hero of the Soviet Union into a heroic dissident.
The development of the atomic and hydrogen bomb can be seen as a kind of Campbellian hero's journey taken by a large group of scientists and engineers, each of whom made a unique contribution and reflected differently on its meaning. As this story illustrates, in the course of this journey, the hero will be forced to decide whether she or he is a moral agent, capable of making ethical decisions, or just someone carried along by the lure of the quest.
The scientists discussed above were expert practitioners in their fields. To be an ethical practitioner, one must both be a virtuous person and be capable of moral reasoning. I will skirt the long arguments about what constitutes virtue and simply argue that a virtuous scientist or inventor is one who wants to make the world a better place. One can have this virtuous goal, and have no idea how to accomplish it--the same way that one could have the goal of inventing a new technology and have no idea how to proceed. For example, Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, felt he was working to create a better world by making war impossibly horrible. He was wrong. Many designers of nuclear weapons used similar reasoning. Let us hope they are right.
Therefore, it is not sufficient to be virtuous--the ethical practitioner must also be capable of moral reasoning. If I am a scientist or an engineer and I want to make the world a better place, I have to be able to think about what that means.
This book is not the place for an extended discussion of moral theory (Werhane, 1994). However, we can consider simplified versions of two moral perspectives as examples. Do I want to adopt a utilitarian perspective, promoting the greatest good for the greatest number? Or do I want to take a respect-for-persons (RP) view, holding paramount the individual's right to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' (Harris, Pritchard, & Rabins, 1995)?
These two perspectives can come into conflict. For example, consider the bombing of Hiroshima. Szilard's utilitarian scientists could make a good case that this terrible weapon actually saved lives in the long run using cost-benefit analysis. The cost of bombing Hiroshima was negligible in terms of American lives, though terrible in terms of Japanese--it killed about 100,000 people. If one assumes that the alternative was the invasion of Japan, the cost of not bombing Hiroshima might have been half-a-million American lives and perhaps four times as many Japanese. Szilard and a group of scientists proposed another alternative--a demonstration on an area with virtually no population, to warn the Japanese that we had a weapon of immense power and persuade them to surrender. The cost of this alternative was using one of the two bombs in existence, and the benefit was uncertain, in the eyes of scientists like Oppenheimer.
From an RP perspective, one could argue that it is never permissible to launch a weapon that is so indiscriminate it kills tens of thousands of civilians outright and leaves thousands of others to die slowly and horribly from radiation sickness.
The dropping of the bomb illustrates another problem in moral reasoning, often referred to as the slippery slope. In the beginning, Allied bomb raids were directed primarily at military targets, though it was often hard to distinguish between military and civilian. Gradually, the scope of bombing was broadened until Curtis Lemay invented fire-bombing, a devastating tactic that allowed him to burn large parts of Japanese cities, killing thousands. It is a huge step from targeting military installations to dropping an atomic bomb; it is a smaller step from destroying cities with conventional bombs to destroying them with a new weapon. Once the U.S. and its allies decided that Japanese civilians were integral to the war effort and had to be targeted, they started down a slippery slope that made additional decisions easier and more obvious. One participant in the final discussions on dropping the bomb argued that the "number of people that would be killed by the bomb would not be greater in general magnitude than the number already killed in fire raids."(Rhodes, 1986, p.648)
Lise Meitner, the physicist who co-discovered fission with Otto Frisch, observed this slippery slope first-hand as Germany drifted into Nazism. There were good Germans in the physics community who were not Nazis, like her collaborator Otto Hahn. As the Nazis gradually took more and more control and started to oppress the Jews, he became focused on saving his institute and asked Meitner, a Jew, not to appear at work any more. "He has, in essence, thrown me out" (Sime, 1996, p.185).
Hahn later helped Meitner emigrate to Sweden, sent some of her things along and tried to keep her in touch with the ongoing research; however, in the end, he denigrated her work in favor of his own and scarcely mentioned her critical work in his Nobel acceptance speech. Even worse, in Meitner's view, was the way the German physics community, with the exception of Max Planck and one or two others, refused to accept any responsibility for the Nazi horrors and even developed the fiction that German physicists had not developed an atomic bomb because they were more ethical than the Allied scientists! In a letter to Hahn right after the war, she wrote:
You all worked for Nazi Germany and you did not even try passive resistance. Granted to absolve your consciences you helped some oppressed person here and there, but millions of innocent people were murdered and there was no protest. I must write this to you, as so much depends upon your understanding of what you have permitted to take place...I and many others are of the opinion that one path for you would be to deliver an open statement that you are aware that through your passivity you share responsibility for what has happened, and that you have the need to work for whatever can be done to make amends....In the last few days one has heard of the unbelievable gruesome things in the concentration camps; it overwhelms everything one previously feared. When I heard on English radio a very detailed report by the English and Americans about Belsen and Buchenwald, I began to cry out loud and lay awake all night. And if you had seen those people who were brought here from the camps. One should take a man like Heisenberg [prominent German physicist] and millions like him, and force them to look at these camps and the martyred people. (Sime, 1996, p. 310)
Another element that enters into moral decisions is whether one should take the position that the end justifies the means, or whether the means is the end (Krishnamurti, 1970). The ring in J.R.R. Tolkien's classic Lord of the Rings is the archetypal example. The heroes in this story were tempted to take this ring and use it, for it could give the right hero enough power to overthrow the Dark Lord, Sauron--but that hero would him or herself be corrupted by the ring and turned into an evil as great as Sauron. This ring has been used to create and control other rings; this set of rings represents a powerful technology which the heroes have to reject because it is a means that can only produce evil, regardless of the initial ends of those who use it.
Consider another example. Abraham Lincoln came to the White House in 1861 on a platform which called for allowing slavery to continue in those states where it was currently legal, but not be allowed to expand to any new territories. When the states of the South seceded and then fired on Fort Sumter, he decided that the preservation of the United States was worth going to war. He was careful to preserve the right to slavery in border states he wanted to keep in the Union; even the Emancipation Proclamation freed only slaves in the rebellious states.
Lincoln was therefore willing both to go to war and preserve slavery in order to restore the Union. Furthermore, along the way, he suspended or violated aspects of the bill of rights, including habeas corpus. Clearly, here was a man who felt that the end, preserving the Union, was worth almost any means. Furthermore, he made a utilitarian calculation: in the short term, thousands of Americans might be killed, but in the long term, "government by the people, of the people and for the people" would not "perish from the earth".
Even Lincoln did not anticipate the horrible butcher's bill that resulted from this war, but although it caused him great anguish, he never flinched. He initiated a draft, supported generals who fought long and bloody campaigns and refused to discuss any peace terms that recognized the Confederacy's right to exist. Furthermore, he spent a great deal of his time with inventors who claimed to have developed new technologies for killing including repeating rifles, machine guns and breech-loading cannons (Bruner, 1956). Without Lincoln's intervention, the North's tardy adoption of mortar flotillas and repeating rifles would have been delayed even more.
While Lincoln had no atomic weapons at his disposal, he embraced the idea of using a new kind of incendiary shell on Charleston, a precursor to the fire-bombings perfected by Curtis LeMay in World War II.
But Lincoln would not stoop to any means. He might have postponed or even canceled the 1864 election, on the grounds that it was a condition of national emergency. However, this means would have destroyed the end of preserving a democratic union. For Lincoln, the 'bottom line' was that democracy depended on a covenant among all parties to settle their disagreements at the ballot box--not by seceding whenever they felt they did not like a decision made by the majority (Wills, 1992).
Even the issue of slavery was subordinate to preserving the democratic union. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed only the slaves in the southern states that were rebelling and he couched emancipation as a military necessity, arguing that the slaves were benefiting the southern cause. He also felt he had no constitutional right to abolish slavery; he still regarded himself as President of all the states, and it was these states and the Congress that had the right to amend the constitution. As Oppenheimer put it: "In order to preserve the Union Lincoln had to subordinate the immediate problem of the eradication of slavery..." (Rhodes, 1986, p.763).
We can continue to argue whether in Lincoln's case, the end really justified the means--destroying much of the South in order to save the Union, suspending rights like habeas corpus in order to defend democracy. The point is, he adopted an explicit moral stance, defended it articulately, tried to anticipate its consequences and, when the consequences were worse than he or anyone had anticipated, continued to assume responsibility. Lincoln combined virtue--a deep concern with making the world a better place for others, not just or even primarily for himself--with moral reasoning, mostly from a utilitarian standpoint--what current actions would produce maximum long-term benefits.
Similarly, Einstein acted against his own principles when he drafted the letter to Roosevelt, because he believed the end--countering a possible Nazi bomb--justified the means--building our own bomb. Einstein later regretted writing the letter. Lincoln certainly had qualms, but there is no evidence that, given a chance to do everything over, he would have decided not to prosecute the war.
In previous chapters, I have tried to show that discovery and invention depend at least partly on mental models. Similarly, ethical behavior depends on what my colleague Patricia Werhane calls moral imagination (Werhane, 1991). She uses the Challenger case as an example.
This shuttle was launched on January 28th, 1986, carrying a crew of seven including the first teacher into space. Seconds into the launch, the rocket booster exploded in front of a national audience.
The night before the ill-fated launch, a group of engineers at Morton Thiokol, including Roger Boisjoly, an expert on O rings, objected to launching the Challenger on the grounds that they had no data on the behavior of these rings at low temperatures, but projections from existing data suggested they would fail. Temperature at the launch was estimated to be 26 degrees Fahrenheit, and the previous lowest launch temperature had been 54.
NASA asked the engineers if they could prove the O rings would fail. They could not. Their data suggested that the probability of O ring failure increased with lower temperature, but the relationship was less than perfect. Finally, Robert Lund, the Vice President of Engineering, was asked by his immediate superior to "take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat" (Werhane, 1991, p. 606). He switched hats, the launch was approved, and all seven of the crew perished.
There have been thousands of pages of analysis of this tragedy, from all kinds of ethical, scientific and political perspectives (for example, see Davis, 1989). What I want to do is focus on how a lack of moral imagination might help explain what happened. Lund, the VP who switched hats, switched perspectives as well--from an engineer concerned with problematic test results to a manager who had a schedule to meet and a customer to satisfy. One could argue that Lund was still a virtuous person--he did not become evil, or immoral. But he engaged in what Davis (Davis, 1989) calls 'microscopic vision'; he accepted the Marhall Flight Center's definition of the problem, which was that the shuttle was safe until proven otherwise.
According to Patricia Werhane, moral imagination involves "at least four things: (1) that one disengage oneself from one's role, one's particular situation, or context; (2) that one becomes aware of the kind of scheme one has adopted and/or that is operating in a particular kind of context; (3) that one creatively envision new possibilities, possibilities for fresh ways to frame experiences and new solutions to present dilemmas; and (4) that one evaluate the old context, the scope or range of the conceptual schemes at work, and new possibilities" (Werhane, 1994).
Lund certainly failed to do (1): he switched from one role to another, but did not 'disengage' from both roles and evaluate his decision from yet another perspective--say, that of one of teacher Christa McAuliffe's students. Would such a student say go ahead and fly if there were any concerns about safety? To put it in terms of ethical theories, Lund adopted a utilitarian cost-benefit view when he put on his manager's hat, and from that standpoint it looked like the risk of damaging Thiokol's relationship with NASA outweighed the uncertainties involved in flying at low temperatures. If he had shifted to an RP perspective, the potential loss of human life would have become the primary consideration.
Point (2) is related: it involves becoming aware that one has adopted a role that works well in certain situations, but may not in the present one. We all assume roles, but we also need to be able to get distance from them, to realize we are also human beings with moral responsibilities, not just actors playing out a script.
In the 1950s, the psychologist Stanley Milgram (Milgram, 1974) decided to test a commonly-held theory about the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. Imagine you were a subject in Milgram's experiment. You responded to an ad calling for volunteers. You are met at the lab by a scientist in a white coat and another volunteer--an ordinary, middle-aged man who seems nice enough.
The scientist flips a coin. You are assigned the role of experimenter, and the other fellow is the learner. He is strapped into a chair next to you. Your job is to hold his hand down on a shock plate and press a key delivering a shock every time he gets an answer wrong. The shocks increase in voltage with every mistake. The shocks are clearly painful--the other fellow shouts "Ow!", then complains of a heart condition and demands to be let go. When you ask the experimenter, he says you must continue, and that he will assume responsibility. Eventually, the other fellow refuses to respond, then loses consciousness.
A variety of experts predicted that only a 'pathological fringe' of one or two percent of ordinary citizens would continue to shock the learner all the way through the 450 volt limit. In fact, Milgram found that 30% administered the highest level of shock when they had to force a victim's hand onto the plate, and obedience was much higher when the victim was in another room. Milgram related this to Eichmann's defense that he was just obeying orders when he murdered thousands of Jews.
Philip Zimbardo (Zimbardo, 1972) did a similar experiment where he used a coin flip to assign student volunteers to prisoner or guard roles in a fake prison. The students identified so strongly with their roles that Zimbardo had to cut the experiment short. Zimbardo himself became more of a prison administrator than a researcher. When he heard that one of the former prisoners, released because he fell apart under the stress, was organizing a break, Zimbardo worked hard to foil it--instead of realizing he had a golden opportunity to study rumor transmission.
What surprised Milgram and Zimbardo is that participants in their experiments did not simply realize they were playing a role they had little incentive to maintain, and walk out--or even call the police and demand an end to the whole experiment!
Points (3) and (4) regarding moral imagination are also connected to this issue of roles. In order to be able to envision new possibilities, one has to be aware that one is operating within a context, or view. Before Kepler, planets moved in circles. That was not a view--that was the way the world was. But Kepler turned this fact into a 'conceptual scheme' or mental model--it became only one way of looking at the universe. Other views became possible. Similarly, once you realize that you are acting a role, you can imagine what would happen if you stepped out of it, and behave differently.
In 1970, Ford introduced the Pinto, a compact that had been designed in record time with a 'limits of 2000' constraint: it could exceed neither 2000 pounds in weight or $2000 in cost. Because of the speed of design, a potential problem with the fuel tank was identified only after the design was frozen: the tank ruptured when hit from the rear at a relatively low speed (about 30 mph). It would have cost $11 a vehicle to fix this problem. Ford used the National Highway Traffic Association's figure for the cost to society of each traffic fatality ($200,000) and did a utilitarian, cost-benefit analysis which showed that it would be more expensive to fix the car than to live with the possibility of over a hundred fatalities. In this case, Ford should have exercised moral imagination and considered the same problem from a rights perspective.
Dennis Gioia was a relatively new employee at Ford in charge of the recalling of defective automobiles. When exposed to evidence that a number of Pintos had exploded, including "graphic, detailed photos of the remains of a burned-out Pinto in which several people had died" (Gioia, 1992, p. 382) he did not issue a recall. Looking back on his decision, Gioia concluded that,
My own schematized knowledge influenced me to perceive recall issues in terms of the prevailing decision environment and to unconsciously overlook key features of the Pinto case, mainly because they did not fit an existing script. Although the outcomes of the [Pinto] case carry retrospectively obvious ethical overtones, the schemas driving my perception and actions precluded consideration of the issues in ethical terms because the scripts did not include ethical dimensions (Gioia, 1992, p. 385).
Schema is a term some cognitive scientists use to refer to the expectations a problem-solver brings to a situation. Kuhn's paradigm is a kind of higher-level schema that tells scientists where to look for interesting research problems, how to investigate them and what results to expect. A mental model is a kind of schema that is especially important for inventors and designers, because their expectations are embodied in imagined objects.
Gioia's schema or set of expectations led him to look for a high frequency of incidents or a clear cause. At this time, there was no clear cause (Giogia was unaware of the test analysis that showed a problem with the fuel tank design) and no pattern of incidents--just occasional flaming crashes. Part of Gioia's schema was the assumption that all small cars are more prone to serious crashes of this sort and that people accept risks when they drive--'safety doesn't sell'. Gioia was also experiencing cognitive overload--he had lots of cases and reports to attend to. So to be noticed, a potential problem had to fit a pattern predicted by his schema.
One outcome of a schema is a script that dictates how one ought to act in certain situations. For example, most of us have scripts for restaurants that include waiting to be seated, getting a menu, ordering, and paying a bill (Schank & Abelson, 1977). After seeing one particularly gruesome wreck, Gioia activated one of his standard scripts and called for a preliminary review of the Pinto case. He agreed with the unanimous decision to leave it on the market. In this case, Gioia knew that the Pinto was a popular, best-selling auto and that other sub-compacts had similar accidents; therefore, it was easy for him to engage in confirmation bias and dismiss evidence that would have violated his schema and activated his recall script. Had he stepped back and realized that he was making assumptions consistent with a certain role, he might have seen able to imagine and evaluate other possible responses to the initial, anecdotal evidence that there were problems with the Pinto.
It is too much to ask Bob Lund or Dennis Gioia or anyone to go through all four steps in moral imagination when an immediate decision is called for. One must already be able to do this kind of moral reasoning, which calls for special training. One of the problems with taking roles too seriously is that they lead to compartmentalization. Bob Lund switched hats from engineer to manager, effectively compartmentalizing a decision that needed to be made from both perspectives.
In Dennis Gioia's case, it might have meant integrating his pre-Ford suspicious-of-corporate-America values with his role at Ford: apparently inconsistent roles which, could they have been integrated, might have helped him see how reports of flaming cars and burning teenagers would have been perceived by most people. In turn, Gioia might have been able to help Ford think of new scripts for responding to warning signals like this.
The point here is not to dump on Mr. Lund, claiming that he is responsible for the whole Challenger disaster, or criticize Mr. Gioia, who was a conscientious employee trying to identify problems serious enough to warrant a recall. It is rather to suggest how an engineer/manager with a different sort of training might have been able to step out of the context in which she or he was operating and evaluate these problem differently. Gioia calls for integrating ethical decision-making into schema and scripts through the use of "vicarious or personal experiences that interrupt tacit knowledge of 'appropriate' action so that script revision can be initiated. Training scenarios, and especially role playing, that portray expected sequences that are the interrupted to call explicit attention to ethical issues can be tagged by the perceiver as requiring attention" (Gioia, 1992, p. 388).
Gioia training scenarios resemble the cases we will be presenting in the rest of the chapter. Moral imagination should be exercised at the discovery and invention stage, not just when problems occur. Charles Perrow (Perrow, 1984) argues that complex systems like nuclear power plants are accidents waiting to happen. He might make a similar argument about the space shuttle, or the design of the Pinto. Avoiding Challenger and Pinto incidents requires more than moral imagination at the time of a problem--it requires moral imagination from the beginning, when a new technology is being created.
Niels Bohr exercised this sort of moral imagination when he foresaw the two sides of the atomic bomb. Bohr's coat of arms bore the inscription "Contraria Sunt Complementa" *(Holton, 1973). He had argued that there were two, complementary ways of looking at light; depending on how one set up an experiment, it behaved as a wave or as a particle. It could not be reduced further--physicists would have to accept light's complementary nature.
Similarly, he saw the atom bomb as both threat and opportunity: a monstrous weapon that threatened mass-destruction and an opportunity to make war--and even nation-states--obsolete (Rhodes, 1986). Bohr felt that the development of atomic weapons meant that, "We are in a completely new situation that cannot be resolved by war" (Rhodes, 1986, p. 532). Bohr tried to communicate these views in various ways to Roosevelt and Churchill, emphasizing the need for international cooperation in dealing with this threat and opportunity after the war--cooperation that would of necessity involve the Soviets. Churchill would have none of it--he thought of atomic weapons as bigger bombs, not qualitatively different weapons, and he also thought that the U.S.-British monopoly on this new technology could be preserved, at least for a time. Roosevelt was initially more sympathetic to Bohr, but was persuaded by Churchill to adopt the Prime Minister's view that this whole effort of Bohr's was subversive and dangerous.
What Bohr advocated was the kind of open sharing of information that was characteristic of science, but not of relations between nations. Once everyone clearly understood the danger represented by fission and fusion weapons, then there would have to be cooperation.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Muzafer Sherif and a group of colleagues, including his wife Carolyn, set-up a series of summer camps at different locations to study inter-group conflict and how to resolve it. Groups of boys arrived at the camp and were randomly assigned to two cabins, and each cabin was deliberately isolated from contact with the other. Group identities soon emerged, with groups taking names like the Rattlers and the Eagles. These groups were brought together for competitive events like Capture the Flag. Intergroup hostility rapidly emerged, leading to insults and fist-fights. Competition heightened intragroup solidarity.
On a small scale, this sounds like the evolution of international hatreds--but compressed into a period of a week, with escalating violence toward the end. How to bring the groups back together?
The Sherifs first tried a common enemy--a sports event in which both groups would have to pool their best players in order to defeat an outside group. The two groups cooperated long enough to beat the other team, but then intergroup hostilities resumed. The threat of a common enemy produced only temporary cooperation--witness the post-war conflict between the Soviets and their World War II allies.
Then, at another camp, the Sherifs tried the equivalent of desegregation. The groups were brought together for a series of pleasant activities--better meals, movies, fireworks. No cooperation was required--just occupying the same space as equals. Unfortunately, these occasions merely served as opportunities for further insults and fights.
Finally, at still another camp, the Sherifs tried using superordinate goals: "problem situations in which goals compelling and appealing to each group could be attained only through the efforts and resources of both groups" (Sherif, 1976, p. 133). First, the staff simulated a failure in the water supply. The boys had to organize themselves to inspect over a mile of pipe, then fix a problem at the reservoir that demanded teamwork. When they returned, the old hostilities resumed.
Second, the boys went in separate trucks on a camping trip. But the truck assigned to get their lunches broke down. (This simulated failure required great skill on the part of the driver). The boys had to pull it up a hill, and hit on the idea of playing tug of war against the truck. Afterwards, they exchanged mutual congratulations and ate together. These sorts of experiences were repeated until mutual sharing was the rule, rather than the exception.
Bohr's moral imagination was to see in nuclear weapons a superordinate goal--a threat so huge it would mandate cooperation. Despite many close calls--including the Cuban missile crisis--the Soviet and American superpowers avoided another world war and instead conducted a ruinous arms race while battling through surrogates. In the end, the Soviet empire crumbled. Nuclear weapons are now possessed by more countries than ever and remain a significant threat. A nuclear war could still break out between countries like India and Pakistan.
What constrains nations is the complementary of this weapon--it promises overwhelming, indiscriminate slaughter against which there is currently no defense and therefore is useless, if the other side possesses it, too. Perhaps Dr. Frankenstein's biggest mistake was to reject his creation, to run from it in horror, thereby helping to turn it into a monster. Bohr did not shrink from the bomb; he embraced its contradictions, and tried to help others see that it had changed everything.
A recent example of this kind of moral imagination is provided by a former Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Air Command, General George Lee Butler, who announced two days after assuming command that with the end of the cold war, SAC's mission was complete--it was time "to think in terms of less rather than more." General Butler called for the elimination of nuclear weapons--not a unilateral, sudden disarmament, but a careful, negotiated reduction in global nuclear weapons, with the United States taking the lead. Now in retirement, he continues to worry about the same issue as Bohr--will governments remember that nuclear weapons threaten such slaughter that they are in effect useless?
In the words of my friend, Jonathan Schell, we face the dismal prospect that The Cold War was not the apogee of the age of nuclear weapons, to be succeeded by an age of nuclear disarmament. Instead, it may well prove to have simply been a period of initiation, in which not only Americans and Russians, but Indians and Pakistanis, Israelis and Iraqis, were adapting to the horror of threatening the deaths of millions of people, were learning the think about the unthinkable. If this is so, will history judge that the Cold War proved only a sort of modern-day Trojan Horse, whereby nuclear weapons were smuggled into the life of the world, made an acceptable part of the way he world works? Surely not, surely we still comprehend that to threaten the deaths of tens of hundreds of millions of people presages an atrocity beyond anything in the record of mankind? Or have we, in a silent and incomprehensible moral revolution, come to regard such threats as ordinary--as normal and proper policy for any self-respecting nation?
This cannot be the moral legacy of the Cold War. And it is our responsibility to ensure that it will not be (Butler, 1997, p. C2).
Moral imagination is not just preventive medicine for inventors and scientists, to be exercised once in a while to see if you are about to create a new Frankenstein. Moral imagination can be used to identify areas in which new discoveries are needed, and to provide a framework for developing new technologies.
The organizing metaphor for these cases is once again Campbell's hero, who is called to a quest, receives help from a mentor and returns with new knowledge or power, but can only use it beneficially after an inner, personal transformation. Frankenstein obtained power, but did not undergo the kind of transformation that would have given him the moral imagination to decide whether and how to use it.
Unlike Frankenstein, the heroes in these cases are motivated by the desire to do well by doing good--to create new technologies that will benefit other people as well as themselves. To be successful, such a quest will also involve a personal and organizational transformation.
Here the individualistic Campbellian metaphor breaks down. In these cases, heroes and heroines must become system builders--they must find allies who can share their values and move towards their goals, allies with complementary skills who can form a network.
John Law (Law, 1987) has written about "the fundamental problem faced by system builders: how to juxtapose and relate heterogeneous elements together such that they stay in place and are not dissociated by other actors in the environment in the course of the inevitable struggles--whether these are social or physical or some mix of the two" (p. 117). He uses the example of Portuguese navigators, who sent frail craft out on a journey of discovery. They had to develop technologies and heuristics for dealing with physical forces; they also had to coordinate financial backers, crews, and compete with traders from other cultures.
Like Law's navigators, the designer-heroes in these cases will be assembling frail networks that are continually threatened. To survive, they will have to recruit others, and convince them to adopt a shared mental model.
According to Paul Ehrlich, "Resource depletion and environmental degradation are the products of three factors: population size; per capita affluence (or consumption); and the environmental impact caused by the technology used to supply each unit of consumption" (Ehrlich, Ehrlich, & Daily, 1995, p. 26). Ehrlich puts this in the form of a simple equation:
Garrett 's classic paper on the Tragedy of the Commons highlights this dilemma (Hardin, 1968); he argued that the practice of allowing sheep to graze on common land in England led to overgrazing by individuals who wanted to take a larger share of the common resource, especially as the population grew. Here the P factor is the main culprit, coupled with the desire for an increase in A. The eventual result is environmental disaster--an overgrazed commons that provides insufficient food for any of the people that share it.
As population increases, other common resources like food, water and air are threatened in the same way. Hardin argued that this tragedy has no technical solution; it can only be solved by recognizing "the necessity of mutual coercion"(Hardin, 1968). We will have to abandon the idea of a commons in breeding, and agree to restrictions. Hardin is generally receptive to strategies like China's one-child restriction as means to achieving this end.
Hardin recalled that a member of the Indian delegation to the first U.N. Conference on global population claimed that development was the best contraceptive. Hardin went on to deride this strategy, and pointed-out that the Indian government gave its states wide powers to restrict population.
In contrast, there are those who argue that increasing affluence will reduce the growth in population (Bast, Hill, & Rue, 1994). This kind of growth is especially important given the widespread poverty that exists in much of the world. In order to lead to a reduction in population, growth needs to be accompanied by a change in the status of women (Kennedy, 1993). "With greater opportunities for education (especially female education), reduction of mortality rates (especially of children), and greater participation of women in employment and in political action, fast reductions in birth rates can be expected to result through the decisions and actions of those whose lives depend on them" (Sen, September 22, 1994, p. 62). Sen cites the example of the Kerala province in India, which is one of the poorer provinces, yet has a relatively low birth rate. The key is that Kerala also has a very high rate of female literacy (87%) relative to other provinces (average of 39%) and a low rate of infant mortality. (Miller, 1996, 230; Sen, 1992, 62).
The Kerala example suggests that increasing affluence is not sufficient to lower birth rate. Providing greater opportunities for women may be the best hope of reducing population increases. In traditionally male-dominated societies like India, this also involves giving women a stake in decisions involving property and distribution of communal resources (Agarwal, 1997). Increasing affluence makes it more likely that women will have increased opportunities, but it takes enlightened policies to insure that this occurs.
Environmental impact is not a product of population alone--it also depends on consumption: "According to one calculation, the average American baby represents twice the environmental damage of a Swedish child, three times that of an Indian, thirteen times that of a Brazilian, thirty-five times that of an Indian, and 280 (!) times that of a Chadian or Haitian because its level of consumption throughout its life will be so much greater" (Kennedy, 1993, p. 32). If the global standard of living continues to rise, environmental degradation and resource exploitation might continue to rise even if population falls.
In contrast, there are those like Mark Sagoff who argue that "The insistence that affluence is a principal cause of the world's environmental ills hides the extent to which poverty, not wealth, is responsible for land degradation, extinction, deforestation, pollution and other problems" (Sagoff, In Press, p. 3). Affluence (A) and technology (T) can actually be factors in reducing environmental impact (I), partly because they lead to a reduction in population (P). Well, A and T can also contribute to a reduction in another P--poverty--which further contributes to the reduction in population growth:
Third world countries are, for the most part, subsistence economies. The rural fold eke out a living by using products gleaned directly from plants and animals. Much labor is needed even for simple tasks. In addition, poor rural households do not have access to modern sources of domestic energy or tap water. In semiarid and arid regions the water supply may not even be nearby. Nor is fuelwood at hand when the forests recede. In addition to cultivating crops, caring for livestock, cooking food and producing simple marketable products, members of a household may have to spend as much as five to six hours a day fetching water and collecting fodder and wood.
Children, then ,are needed as workers even when their parents are in their prime. Small households are simply not viable; each one needs many hands. In parts of India, children between 10 and 15 years have been observed to work as much as one and a half times the number of hours that adult males do. By the age of six, children in rural India tend domestic animals and care for younger siblings, fetch water and collect firewood, dung and fodder. It may well be that the usefulness of each extra hand increases with declining availability of resources, as measured by, say, the distance to sources of fuel and water (Dasgupta, 1994).
This kind of subsistence living involves a tremendous amount of environmental damage. Someone who is starving has little concern for the commons--she or he will take whatever is needed for food and fuel, and move on when resources are depleted. In El Salvador, for example, subsistence farmers who were driven from their homes during the civil war "have to clear more land than before because the soil is poor. In addition, most fuel is unavailable or extremely expensive, leaving wood the cheapest and most available means of cooking. The deforestation accelerates soil erosion, which in turn causes rives to fill with sediment, killing water life" (Farah, 1997, p. A17).
Perhaps an American baby causes less of some kinds of environmental damage than one from Chad, or Haiti, or El Salvador, because the American baby does not depend on slash and burn agriculture. Affluence may have a beneficial impact on the environment, if the affluence is widely shared in a society and not concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs.
Enter the third factor, technology, which in Ehrlich's simple equation multiplied the negative effects of population and affluence. In 1971, Barry Commoner argued that ,
Economic growth is a popular whipping boy in certain ecological circles...The rate of exploitation of the ecosystem, which generates economic growth, cannot increase indefinitely without overdriving the system and pushing it to the point of collapse. However, this theoretical relationship does not mean that any increase in economic activity automatically means more pollution. What happens to the environment depends on how the growth is achieved. During the 19th century the nation's economic growth was in part sustained by rapacious lumbering, which denuded whole hillsides. On the other hand, the economic growth that in the 1930s began to lift the United States out of the Depression was enhanced by an ecologically sound measure, the soil conservation program (Commoner, 1971, p. 139).
More recently, Commoner contrasted this ecologically-sound growth view with that of those who argue that the environment can only be saved
if human society gives up further economic growth, and with it the continued attack on the environment. Others would exact a sterner tribute, requiring that the world population--and with it the present scale of economic activity and environmental stress--be reduced. At the edge of irrationality there is the view of Earth First! that the treaty should require modern industrial society to "give way to a hunter-gatherer way of life, which is the only economy compatible with a healthy land" (Commoner, 1990, p. 191-2).
Rachel Carson, in her classic Silent Spring, objected vehemently to the widespread use of chemical insecticides:
As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life--a fabric on the one hand miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no "high-minded orientation", no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.
The "control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth (Carson, 1962, p. 261-2).
But Carson was not against using technology to control insect populations. Instead of chemical tools, she advocated biological ones: bacteria that attacked undesirable insects, natural insect predators and the use of radiation to create sterile males of an undesirable species.
The Commoner and Carson examples suggest that technology can be a solution to environmental problems, allowing sustainable growth, provided we take new technological directions. In other words, T(echnology) could be changed from a variable in Ehrlich's equation that increases pollution to one that decreases it (for some persuasive arguments along these lines, see Bast, et al., 1994). In the rest of this chapter, we will consider technologies that may pave the way toward sustainable growth.
In his provocative novel Ishmael, Daniel Quinn (1992) argues that about ten thousand years ago, a new kind of Taker civilization emerged, one based on the idea of dominion over the Earth. The Takers developed agricultural technologies that gave them the ability to produce more food than they needed, thereby expanding the population. The alternative hunter-gatherer and herder cultures Quinn refers to as Leavers, to indicate the way in which they allow nature to limit their population and guide their choice of food and other resources:
the Takers systematically destroy their competitors' food to make room for their own. Nothing like this occurs in the natural community. The rule there is: Take what you need, and leave the rest alone"(Quinn, 1992, p. 127).
For Quinn, any attempt to promote sustainable development without a change in Taker attitudes would be a failure. What is needed is for human beings to change the fundamental myth, or story on which most of the civilized world operates: "the old horror of Man Supreme, wiping out everything on this planet that doesn't serve his needs directly or indirectly" (Quinn, 1992, p. 249).
In terms of moral theory, Quinn believes in creating virtuous people by altering the myth most of us live by--once we have internalized a new myth, we will know how to share resources, not just with other human beings but also with other species. Aldo Leopold advocated a land ethic, which "changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such" (Leopold, 1966, p. 240). But how does one acquire this new myth, or view? It will not be enough to hear it--one will have to take the hero's inward journey oneself, or be uniquely prepared by one's previous life experience.
It is also not enough to substitute one myth for another. One should not hold either a Leaver or Taker position dogmatically. The hunter-gatherer model used by Quinn to exemplify the Leaver perspective could not work for a world populated by billions--in order to return to that state, there would have to be a horrific decline in global population. Moral imagination is a tool for combating dogma, for recognizing that there are different ethical perspectives that can be applied to a problem. The hope is that by exercising moral imagination, practitioners will become reflective, considering alternative views and arriving at decisions that are better than one could develop from only one frame of reference.
The way out of the Taker dilemma is not to return to a more primitive society, but to change one's attitude towards nature. Carolyn Merchant describes Aldo Leopold's land ethic as ecocentric--she feels that his privileges nature over the human, in contrast to egocentric or homocentric views, the former privileging the individual human and the latter the human species as a whole. The Leaver ethic is not ecocentric--it sees humans as part of nature, no less or more important than the whale or the nematode. As Quinn says, "We have as much business being stewards of the world as infants have being stewards of the nursery" (Quinn, 1994, p. 144).
Merchant proposes a partnership ethic, in which "the greatest good for the human and nonhuman community is to be found in their mutual, living interdependence" (Merchant, 1997, p. 49). This suggests a way out of the Taker/Leaver dilemma. Humans are not infants in a nursery; we are in kinship with nature, sometimes taking a more dominant role, other times listening and being guided.
William
McDonough has developed a set of principles which he and Paul
Hawken use to achieve this kind of partnership
(Hawken & McDonough, November, 1993). They place particular
emphasis on one of the heuristics employed by Bell in his
invention of the telephone: follow the analogy of nature.
According to Hawken,
Business has three basic issues to face: what it takes, what it makes, and what it wastes, and the three are intimately connected. First, business takes too much from the environment and does so in a harmful way; second, the products it makes require excessive amounts of energy, toxins and pollutants; and finally, the method of manufacture and the very products themselves produce extraordinary waste and cause harm to present and future generations of all species, including humans. The solution for all three dilemmas are three fundamental principles that govern nature. First, waste equals food. In nature, detritus is constantly recycled to nourish other systems with a minimum of energy and inputs. We call ourselves consumers, but the problem is we do not consume. Each person in America produces twice his weight per day in household, hazardous and industrial waste. and an additional half-ton per week when gaseous wastes such as carbon dioxide are included. An ecological model of commerce would imply that all waste (sic) have value to other modes of production so that everything is either reclaimed, reused or recycled. Second, nature runs off of current solar income. The only input into the closed system of the earth is the sun. Last, nature depends on diversity, thrives on differences, and perishes in the imbalance of uniformity. Healthy systems are highly varied and specific to time and place (Hawken, 1993, p. 12).
Here nature provides a model for the partnership. As Barry Commoner noted, "in nature, there is no such thing as 'waste.' In every natural system, what is excreted by one organism as waste is taken up by another as food"(Commoner, 1971, p. 36) . If a way could be found to follow the analogy of nature, making wastes into food, preserving diversity and using no more of the Earth's fuel resources than are replaced by the sun's energy, then one could have sustainable growth that would respect the diversity of species and the rights of future generations to clean air, water and abundant sources of energy. Indeed, McDonough wants to go beyond sustainability to restoration because he wants to leave the Earth better than it is now (McDonough, 1997). Paul Hawken expresses this philosophy in terms of an economic golden rule for the restorative economy: "Leave the world better than you found it, take no more than you need, try not to harm life or the environment, make amends if you do" (Hawken, 1993, p. 139).
Julian Simon, a frequent critic of environmentalists, has argued that the greatest resources is the human mind, that innovation can overcome environmental challenges (Bast, Hill, & Rue, 1994). I think Hawken and McDonough would agree with him. We do not have to go on designing things the way we have done in the past; the human mind is capable of inventing restorative technologies. But the first step will be a change in mental models:
In today's industrial economy, standard thinking is cradle-to-grave: companies who make chemicals should work with end-users so the wastes are properly and safely disposed of. This methodology is an improvement over the "no deposit, no return" mentality that preceded it, but it remains in essence, a license for industry to persist in manufacturing toxins. In addition, the final disposal solutions available today are unacceptable--all of them--including deep-well injection, incineration, and fly-ash storage. Today, when many people's bodies in industrial nations are, technically speaking, too toxic to be placed in landfills, it is time to establish a pathway to eliminate the poisons, a chain of actions and consequences that energizes business, that stimulates innovation, that preserves employment, and restores the environment. A cyclical, restorative economy thinks cradle-to-cradle, so that every product or by-product is imagined in its subsequent forms even before it is made. Designers must factor in the future utility of a product, and the avoidance of waste, from its inception (Hawken, 1993, p. 71).
For Hawken and McDonough, the place to begin is the corporation. Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface, Inc., the world's largest commercial carpet manufacturer, had an epiphany when he read Hawken's Ecology of Commerce. At the time, Interface had slipped from its number one position. Anderson had called in a turn-around expert who made him feel like an outsider in the company he had created. Anderson "was stunned to read about the breadth of toxins accumulating from one generation to the next and the speed at which natural resources were being depleted." Mr. Anderson could see his own company on every page: carpet mills sucking up hydrocarbons and spewing out toxins. He wept, thinking about his grandchildren's future. "It was a spear in my chest," he says. (Petzinger, 1997, p. B1). Anderson learned from Hawken that "business and industry, the largest, wealthiest, most pervasive institution on earth, must take the lead in saving the earth..." (Anderson, 1995, p. 6). Anderson decided to transform Interface. He needed a system, and turned to The Natural Step, another organization Hawken was involved with.
The Natural Step was created by Karl-Henrik Robert, a pediatric oncologist who became concerned about the rising rate of cancer in children. He was struck by the fact that parents of these children would do anything to cure the cancer, yet such parents, acting in concert as members of society, could not take the environmental steps that would reduce the risk of such cancer. He decided that action was prevented, in part, by disagreements over matters of detail like what specific level of a potential carcinogen was really harmful. Paul Hawken, who became Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Natural step, argued that scientists were arguing about the withering leaves instead of focusing on a fact they could all agree on: the tree was dying (Hawken, 1995).
Robert wrote a draft paper outlining the fundamental system conditions essential for a sustainable society and shared it with a group of fifty scientists. Twenty-one drafts later, he had a consensus document, based on the laws of thermodynamics, which the Natural Step interprets as follows:
1) Conservation of matter and energy, which means that we never really consume matter or energy, we just change its form.
2) Entropy, meaning that matter and energy tend towards lower levels of organization. When we appear to consume matter or energy, we are really increasing its entropy.
Given these laws, how can complex systems like life occur? Because of the way in which plants use the sun's energy for photosynthesis. The Natural Step (TNS), like McDonough's protocols, is based on an analogy to nature, in which the sun's energy fuels a local reversal of entropy, allowing evolution of complex, highly-organized forms, including human beings and the technologies we create.
From this assumption, TNS derives four fundamental system conditions:
1) Substances from the Earth's crust must not systematically increase in the biosphere. This implies that natural resources like fossil fuels should not be extracted at a rate greater than they can be replaced by the natural cycle of photosynthesis and sunlight. The conclusion here is the same as Hawken and McDonough's principle, 'work from current solar income', but it has the implication that we are not only using up our energy reserves, we are systematically polluting the biosphere with greenhouse gases.
Note that Robert can side-step the detailed argument about whether a greenhouse effect is really occurring by pointing-out that "the concentration of substance in the ecosphere will increase and eventually reach limits--often unknown--beyond which irreversible changes occur" (Robert, Daly, Hawken, & Holmberg, 1996, p. 5).
2) Substances produced by society must not systematically increase in the biosphere. The implication here is that human-created substances must not be produced at a rate greater than natural systems can absorb--or else we will again risk 'irreversible changes'. McDonough and Hawken's 'waste equals food' reaches a similar conclusion, but TNS holds out the possibility that there may be other ways to absorb waste besides making them food for organisms.
It seems to me that TNS might not object to wastes that could be locked into some kind of geological formation for thousands of years. This is one of the disposal mechanisms proposed for nuclear wastes and while I am sure TNS would object to nuclear power on other grounds, it is possible that the waste could be stored deep in a geological formation for millennia. The problem is, no one could guarantee that some natural or human disaster would not break it loose again, while it was still active.
3) The physical basis for the productivity and diversity of nature must not be systematically deteriorated. This is the 'don't slash and burn the rain forest' argument: we have to protect the photosynthesis engine that drives the evolution of complex system.
4) There should be fair and efficient use of resources with respect to human needs. For TNS, efficiency means satisfying the first three conditions. "Basic human needs must be met with the most resource-efficient methods possible, and their satisfaction must take precedence over provision of luxuries" (Robert, Daly, Hawken, & Holmberg, 1996, p. 5). 'Needs over luxuries' is where the fairness issue comes in, and does threaten to entangle TNS in a debate about what is a luxury, and what is a need? But as we noted earlier, poverty is one of the causes of pollution, and the poor are also more likely to experience the effect of contaminated drinking water, air pollution and other environmental hazards--witness the shanty town surrounding Bhopal.
TNS has begun to have a major impact on corporations like Interface and IKEA. At Interface, which works with both William McDonough and TNS, "A new tufting method has cut nylon use 10%. Old fibers are 'combed' rather than melted for recycling. Certain yarns are substituted with hemp and flax, a step toward carpeting that is both 'harvestable' and compostable. Processing water is treated for golf-course irrigation. Massive electric motors are jump-started with gravity-feed systems rather than huge jolts of electricity... 'Looking at waste really forces you to look at how your systems are designed', says James Hartzfield, a top Interface official" (Petzinger, 1997, p. B1).
These 'natural steps' are not only good for the environment, they also help the bottom-line, saving Interface $25 million since 1995. Interface is also gaining a reputation as a low-cost, green vendor. For example, Interface's green reputation gained it a opportunity to bid on carpeting Gap's new headquarters; Interface then won the bid based on cost.
IKEA is a major global manufacturer or furniture. The company's name is derived from the initials of its founder, Ingvar Kamprad, who began a mail-order business in Sweden selling, among other things, home furniture. In the post World War II period, Swedish furniture prices went up much faster than other goods. Kamprad saw this as both a social problem and a business opportunity and moved in with a large selection of lower price furnishings. According to Kamprad, "The IKEA vision is to contribute to a better way of life for the majority of people. We do this by offering a wide range of home furnishings of good design and function, at prices so low that the majority of people can afford to buy them" (p. 47) . IKEA grew into a major mail order and retail supplier of furniture and other household products.
German regulators spotted a problem with the formaldehyde content of the fiberboard used by IKEA. Instead of evolving a minimal response to this regulation, IKEA started to work with Dr. Robert to create a standard that would exceed any regulations the company might encounter worldwide, thereby freeing it from concern with any regulations. IKEA would also fulfill the mandate of its founder to 'contribute to a better way of life for the majority of people'.
Among the 'Natural Steps' taken by IKEA were:
1) A "Trash is Cash" program, which included the construction of an on-site recycling center at the store in Gotenborg, Sweden and selling materials like wood, cardboard, metal and paper that would have formerly gone into the landfill. The result was an improved bottom line as well as a cleaner world.
2) IKEA worked with Greenpeace to reduce the environmental impact of its catalogue, which used over 40,000 metric tons of paper. IKEA managed to eliminate the use of chlorine bleach in creating its catalogue, prohibited the use of any paper made from old growth forest, and agreed to recycle all of its catalogues and even those of its competitors.
3) Joined the U.S. E.P.A.'s Green Lights' Program, which meant a commitment to reduce kilowatt/hours in North American IKEA stores by at least 15%. After four years of research, IKEA came up with a way of retrofitting its stores with fluorescent lighting whose initial cost would be recovered in less than two years by energy savings. These new lights required less energy to operate, lasted longer and generated less heat, thereby producing savings on cooling bills as well.
Interface and IKEA demonstrate that social responsibility and profit can go hand-in-hand. In contrast, Milton Friedman argued that "there is one and only one social responsibility of business--to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engage in open and free competition without deception or fraud" (Friedman, 1996, p. 126). A corporate executive may do what she likes as an individual, but in her official capacity, she is responsible to the shareholders and employees. If she decides to take an action that will benefit the environment, one that costs extra money and goes above and beyond what is required by law, she is spending shareholders money, possibly reducing employee salaries or raising costs to consumers.
Note that Friedman would have no difficulty with a company that decided to 'go green' as a marketing strategy, as long as the motive was profit. If a green reputation gets Interface a chance to bid on Gap's headquarters, that is simply good business. But the company should be careful to do only what is necessary to market itself as green, and only as long as buyers care.
Let us consider an example: the AES Corporation, a supplier of power to utilities, decided to devote two million dollars, or about one year of profits, to activities that would reduce the environmental impact of its coal-fired power plants, in the absence of any regulations that would force them to take these actions (Southerland, 1995). This move was not made in anticipation of any increase in sales, due to their 'green' strategy. Friedman would regard this as an involuntary tax imposed by AES management on its shareholders and customers.
On the other hand, Friedman would not have a problem with the environmental reforms made by Interface and IKEA if their primary goal was improving the company's bottom line. To retrofit lighting in order to save money is fine; to do it because a company wants to be socially responsible is, in Friedman's view, unethical.
Hawken and McDonough's philosophy of corporate responsibility appears to be diametrically opposed to Friedman's. But in fact, Hawken and McDonough suggest ways of changing the rules of the game in ways that would encourage companies like AES to behave responsibly towards the environment without hurting their bottom line. Again, this kind of change follows the analogy of nature. Organisms evolve to take advantage of every ecological niche, including those created by the waste produced by other organisms. Given a multi-million year time frame, presumably organisms would evolve that would use our industrial wastes as food. But we don't have that kind of time, so we will have to evolve market mechanisms that will encourage this kind of cycle.
One way to accomplish this would be to have the government impose 'green taxes', such as a tax on the carbon content of fuels like coal. Then companies like AES could obtain a lower tax rate by using alternate energy sources, or planting trees in rainforest locations, or designing more efficient coal-burning operations.
Such changes in the rules would make environmental responsibility consonant with profit. The problem, as Hawken notes, is that corporate leaders are so involved with the political process that they can prevent such changes. To return to Friedman's argument, corporate leaders don't just respond to the rules of the game--they make them. Therefore, one is back to the central problem: one has to convince a few imaginative business leaders to push ahead toward sustainability--to prove that it is both possible and desirable. A few virtuous leaders can pave the way to new sets of rules that will make it easier for others to follow.
Another possible change in the rules would be to allow prices to reflect actual environmental costs. The physicist Amory Lovins likes to use the example of Desert Storm. The motivation for this operation was to free Kuwait and protect Saudi Arabia, but we would not have been so interested in these countries if they did not supply much of the world's oil. Therefore, argues, the war constituted in part a way of subsidizing lower oil prices. If the price of oil were raised to partly cover the costs of these sorts of wars, then companies and individuals might be encouraged to insulate homes, make more efficient automobiles, invest in solar energy, etc.--in effect, making us far less dependent on foreign oil and benefiting the environment at the same time (Lovins, Lovins & Zuckerman, 1986).
The first step in moral imagination is recognizing that one has assumptions about reality which constitute a view, or perspective. The idea that we must protect tanker routes from the Gulf in order to insure energy supplies is such a view. Lovins is trying to tweak us into engaging in moral imagination by doing what systems engineers call outscoping. If the real problem is energy supplies, why not outscope to consider other solutions besides oil? What about conservation? alternate fuel sources? insulation?
There were certainly other reasons for protecting the national sovereignty of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia besides insuring a plentiful supply of oil. But it is clear oil was a factor, and we need to consider this kind of military presence as part of the cost of oil--a human cost, not just a financial one.
Amory and L. Hunter Lovins also engage in moral imagination when they confront the problem of designing energy-efficient vehicles. They think the barrier is cultural, not technological: that the automobile industry "is not a composite-molding/electrical/software culture but a diemaking/steel-stamping/mechanical culture. Their fealty is to heavy metal, not light synthetics; to mass, not information. They have tens of billions of dollars, and untold psychological investments, committed to stamping steel. They know steel, think steel, and have a presumption in favor of steel. They design cars as abstract art and then figure out the least unsatisfactory way to make them, rather than seeking the best ways to manufacture with strategically advantageous materials and then designing cars to exploit those manufacturing methods" (Lovins & Lovins, 1995, p. 84).
Lovins and Lovins are trying to get auto manufacturers and consumers to imagine a very different world, in which most of us drive ultralight cars that look very different from the ones now on the road. Creative engineers at General Motors have built at least one prototype that gets 62 mpg; Lovins and Lovins envision designs that could get over 300 mpg. "We Americans recently put our sons and daughters in .56 mpg tanks and 17-feet-per-gallon aircraft carriers because we hadn't put them in 32 mpg cars--sufficient, even if we'd done nothing else, to have eliminated the need for American oil imports from the Persian Gulf (Lovins & Lovins, 1995, p. 85).
Another example from transportation is the contrast between the bus systems of New York and Curitiba, Brazil. In New York, "a four-mile bus ride is a smelly, jolting forty-minute journey taken by the old and poor. In Curitiba, Brazil, it's a clean, fast trip half the city makes twice daily" (McKibben, 1995, p. 65). The bus system in Curitiba involves several innovations:
1. Special lanes for buses.
2. New tube stations, where eight passengers can board per second.
3. Special extra-large buses that can accommodate up to 270 passengers.
The mental model for this bus system was a subway--it is a surface subway, much cheaper than building an underground. In what sense is this above-ground subway an exercise in moral imagination? Why isn't this just a clever technological fix for a complex urban problem?
Behind the bus system is a vision--of a green metropolis where most residents own cars but choose not to use them, where the downtown is a pedestrian mall and citizens can still move freely and quickly around the city. The bus system is part of an overall city plan that emphasizes environmental responsibility and also tries to reduce poverty by allowing the poor to trade recycled trash for food, providing free medical care and a network of local libraries housed in lighthouses. Curitiba is not utopia--shantytowns still sprout on the outskirts and infant mortality is still high (Lewan, 1994). But there is a commitment to innovative solutions that simultaneously attack poverty and pollution.
In contrast, there is no guiding vision for New York. The accepted reality is survival--New Yorkers take a kind of gritty pride in their toughness as the city lurches along like its buses, barely working much of the time. Curitiba loaned a few buses and tube stations to New York and for a time, they ran well. But none of the balkanized agencies responsible for transit in New York appears to have learned anything from it--it had nothing to do with the 'realities' of life in New York. The first lesson of moral imagination is that this reality is a view.
But is all this change really necessary? What if dangers to the environment are overstated? Bast et al. (1994), in their provocative book Eco-Sanity, argue that many ecological crises are not founded on scientific evidence but are instead scare tactics used by environmental organizations. They cite such examples as global warming, ozone depletion and pesticides. In the first two cases, scientific evidence does not support increasing temperatures or decreasing ozone--nor does it rule them out.
The question is, what do you do when evidence is ambiguous, at best? Do you, to paraphrase Pascal, wager that there will be a greenhouse effect and take action--or that there won't, and risk the consequences (Freeman, 1997). A cost-benefit analysis might suggest it is worth risking the consequences. An RP perspective might counter that we want to consider the rights of future generations and take measures to prevent any possible harms. One Wall Street Journal columnists put it this way: "Even if the doomsayers of environmentalism are overly pessimistic, we obviously can't consume the finite forever. Only business can create a renewable future, and only by following nature's own example" (Petzinger, 1997, p. B1).
Regarding pesticides, the reduced risk is largely due to the work of Rachel Carson and others. Not all pesticides are harmful, and some have had an important role in controlling insect populations that lead to diseases. Robert B. Shapiro, the CEO of Monsanto, argues that as much as 90% of the chemicals sprayed on crops are wasted and end up in the soil. In his opinon, it is much less wasteful to put the information on the plant, using biotechnology (Magenta, 1997).
How is one going to persuade other CEOs besides Shapiro to reduce pollution and think more about sustainability? Instead of changing the tax-code, as Hawken and McDonough advocate, or adding more environmental regulations, Bast et al. would rely on the legal system:
The manner in which the common law system discovers the appropriate size of awards for damages makes the common law approach a promising tool in the battle against pollution. The judicial process is essentially an adversarial one in which the alleged victims of pollution present the strongest possible case for their victimhood, while the alleged polluters put forth the strongest case denying their guilt. The final decisions of guilt or innocence and the size of the awards, if any, are made by independent judges and juries. This process measures, more accurately than any political process could, the true extent of injuries and the value society places on such injuries (Bast, Hill, & Rue, 1994, p. 221).
But the legal system does not guarantee the victory of science over superstition, as the next section shows.
This page was last edited: Wednesday, July 14, 1999